Syria’s revolt grimly enters its 15th month of strife

Syria’s revolt grimly enters its 15th month of strife

DAMASCUS — Syria’s anti-regime revolt entered its 15th month on Tuesday amid relentless violence that has killed more than 12,000 people and growing fears by Arab states that a UN-backed peace plan will fail.

Another 16 people were killed on Tuesday in nationwide violence, including seven in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, four in the coastal city of Banias, and four in Damascus province, among them a six-year-old girl, a watchdog said.

All of those killed were civilians except for a rebel fighter who died in Deir Ezzor, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

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The bloodshed comes despite a truce brokered by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan as part of a six-point plan aimed at ending violence that has swept Syria since March 2011, when the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad broke out.

The United Nations has accused both sides to the conflict of violating the ceasefire and warned that Syria was edging closer to full-blown civil war.

The Damascus government maintains that foreign-backed “armed terrorist groups” are behind the unrest, trying to undermine the regime and scuttle attempts at political reform.

Officials on Tuesday said slightly more than half of eligible voters had taken part in legislative elections held this month but boycotted by the opposition and described as “ludicrous” by Washington.

Electoral commission chief Khalaf al-Azzawi said turnout stood at 51.26 percent for the May 7 vote which he declared was “transparent and democratic.”

The election marked the first “multi-party” vote in five decades and followed the adoption in February of a new constitution. Nine parties were created, and seven had candidates vying for parliament.

In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister warned on Monday that confidence in Annan’s peace mission was fading fast because of the bloodshed.

“Confidence in the efforts of the international envoy is falling rapidly because fighting and bloodshed continue,” Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters, after Riyadh hosted a summit of Arab leaders of the Gulf.

Part of Annan’s six-point plan includes the deployment in flashpoint areas of around 300 UN military observers.

There were “more than 200 observers” on the ground by Tuesday, and one team had set up base in Deir Ezzor on Monday, said Major General Robert Mood, the head of the UN mission in Syria.

Although the number of casualties has decreased since the observers began trickling into Syria in mid-April, the violence has not stopped.

According to the Britain-based Observatory, more than 12,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have died since the uprising began on March 15 last year, including more than 900 killed since the April 12 truce.

In addition, foreign doctors returning from a secret mission inside Syria reported that people wounded in the regime’s crackdown on dissent, as well as the medics who treat them, risk arrest and even torture.

“The aim of the Syrian army was clearly to kill the wounded and those suspected of treating them,” said one doctor on the team from Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), which entered Syria illegally after failing to get government permission.

A source in Syrian National Council said meanwhile that Paris-based academic Burhan Ghalioun was elected as the main opposition group’s chief in a vote held in Rome on Tuesday.

Ghalioun, who has led by consensus rather than through an election since the SNC’s founding in October 2011, won 21 votes compared with 11 for another opposition figure, Georges Sabra.

In neighbouring Lebanon, the army deployed in sectors of the northern city of Tripoli after nine people were killed in three days of sectarian violence between groups who support and oppose Syria’s regime.

Troops entered Syria Street, the frontline of fighting between a majority Sunni Muslim district and another that is mostly Alawite, an offshoot of Islam to which Syria’s President Assad belongs.